How to Build Consumer Email Lists for Your Business

For a company to effectively manage its online presence, it is a necessary factor for them to be able to make sure that they are actively building and maintaining consumer email lists. This is much easier than it has been in the past, because businesses can easily collect the kind of contact information that most people feel comfortable giving: their e-mail address. Therefore, if you’re going to keep in contact with your customers then you’ll want to make sure that you have an effective e-mail management system.

The first part of the system involves being strategic about collecting names and e-mail addresses. The easiest way to do this is to offer customers who visit your website or social media presence the opportunity to get something that they value.

It’s cost-effective to do this by offering them some kind of information/report that would help them utilize some of the products and services that they will eventually buy from you or that what help them in their everyday life. In most cases, you want to make sure that the information is so helpful to the customer that they do not hesitate in providing you their contact details.

This trade of information for contact details is an important one because you can follow up this process by establishing a working relationship with your customer. Your part in the relationship is to provide timely and helpful information that that demonstrates to them that you know and understand what their problems are. Their part is to provide you feedback in how to solve their problems.

Doing this on a regular basis, provides numerous sales opportunities. While on the one hand, you definitely want to make sure that you are marketing to your customers directly; being their “problem solver” gives you a psychological edge in the relationship. The more that you actually help your customer, you become an authority and trusted advisor instead of just another salesperson. This is important to do, because of all of the noise in the marketplace.

You can bet that your customer or competition will be sending its own set of sales messages. The way that you’ll differentiate yourself is to be the best at solving everyday problems in their lives. You want to turn the traditional business-customer relationship around so that they’re seeking or chasing you. You don’t want to have to chase them in anticipation of strong-arming them to hear your message. Using e-mail in this way helps you to establish yourself in a category as an advisor worthy to be sought out.

Once you have mastered this process of collecting and relating, you’ll want to make sure that every interaction with prospects carries with it an opportunity to join your e-mail list. As you do this in every area of their potential interaction, your database and potential for marketing opportunities grows even as you continue to market your business in order to make sales directly.

Although the process is not impossible for business owners to manage themselves, getting the e-mail opportunity in front of all of your potential customers, takes a knowledge of both customer behavior and the technology that drives the e-mail collection process. If you’re interested in finding out more about how you can grow the number of your e-mail collection points, click here.